Biz & IT —

Windows, reimagined: A review of Windows 8

Windows 8 is a study in compromises. Do its two halves form a coherent whole?

Calling at all stations

Windows 8 isn't Microsoft's first product to sport a Metro design. The Zune series of portable media players and their companion app on the PC laid the Metro groundwork: the dependence on typography and the avoidance of faux-3D artifice, as well as applications that used the full screen (or full window) instead of devoting space to borders, title bars, menus, and other visual clutter.

It was with Windows Phone 7 that Metro first became a general-purpose user-interface vocabulary. Windows Phone 7 built on the earlier concepts of typography and full-screen applications, adding mechanisms such as "live tiles," the squares and rectangles that populate the Start screen and serve dual purpose as application launchers and status indicators, along with the "app bar," a small toolbar docked to the bottom of the screen.

In the Developer Preview we learned about the next iteration of Metro. Live tiles, full-screen applications, and typography were all core, but to this Microsoft added the Edge UI.

Understanding the Edge UI is instrumental to understanding Windows 8. As bold and colorful and important as the Start screen with its Live Tiles is, it is Edge UI that drives Windows 8. It is also Edge UI that is Windows 8's biggest stumbling block.

Edge UI is invoked in a few different ways. Mouse users have two main gestures: the first is putting the cursor into any corner of the screen and either clicking or moving the mouse up or down vertically (depending on which function they wish to use); the second is right-clicking. Touch users swipe from any edge of the screen. Laptop users with suitable touchpads (most aren't, but they should become more common in the coming months) can similarly swipe from any edge of their touchpads. There are also keyboard shortcuts.

The basics of Edge UI haven't changed significantly since I described how it worked in the Developer Preview, but to recap the basics:

The left-hand edge controls task switching. You can swipe in from the left to cycle through open apps, or swipe and hold to see a list of all open apps to allow direct switching.

The right-hand edge controls the charms, a set of five core features: search, share, start, devices, and settings. Except for the start charm, which always toggles the visibility of the Start screen, the charms are contextual, so the Settings charm is used to access the settings of the app currently in use.

The top and bottom edges control the app bar. Unlike Windows Phone, which made the app bar a near-permanent on-screen fixture, in Windows 8 the app bar is hidden until revealed with a swipe.

Enlarge/ The charms had their first public outing in the Developer Preview. Since then, the icons have changed; the functionality hasn't. From top to bottom: Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings.

The charms are second in importance to the Edge UI. They provide consistent top-level access to five broad functional areas. When invoked with the Start screen visible, they act in a global way; for example, Search defaults to searching all your apps, settings, or files. Their focus is narrowed when invoked with an app visible—the search charm switches to an app's specific search feature, for example.

While search and settings are self-explanatory, share and devices need a little more explanation. Unlike desktop software, Metro apps can't directly communicate with each other. Internet Explorer, for example, cannot directly communicate with the e-mail app. This means that Internet Explorer cannot tell the e-mail app "create a new e-mail with this URL in it."

Instead, Metro apps have to perform this kind of communication via the Share charm. Apps that have data to share just need to feed it into the sharing system, which happens whenever you open the Share charm. Apps that can do useful things with shared data—sending it to someone by e-mail, uploading it to a cloud service, tweeting it—register with the system, and are listed in the Share charm. You then pick the app you want to use to share from the list the charm provides.

To e-mail a URL, for example, you browse to the URL in Internet Explorer, then open the Share charm. The Mail app will be listed; tap it and a new mail with the URL will be created. All the communication is mediated by the operating system.

The Devices charm is broadly similar, but with a hardware twist. Printers, video projects, networked media devices, and the like all appear in the Devices charm. To print a webpage, you open the Devices charm and then choose your printer; to stream music to a networked Xbox 360, you play the song you want in the music app, then open the Devices charm and pick your Xbox.

There is one other twist on the Metro concept. Although the Metro apps are, by default, full-screen, with every pixel of screen space devoted to the app, Windows 8 also offers a side-by-side snapped view, with one app given a 320-pixel strip on the left or right edge of the screen, and a second app given the bulk of the pixels.

The Developer Preview contained a fairly complete implementation of the Windows 8 user interface, but it was not quite finished. That version retained the Start button on the desktop's taskbar. The Consumer Preview, released in late February, 2012, removed it, placing greater emphasis on the hot-corner approach.

On single-monitor systems, the hot corners work well, but we found that they were very troublesome on multimonitor machines. With multiple monitors, there was nothing to catch the mouse in the corner of the screen, it would just slide onto the next monitor.

The final beta came in May 2012. The Release Preview included modest alterations to the interface, particularly to address those multimonitor concerns, with the introduction of little "traps" in each corner: barriers a few pixels tall that would stop the mouse from lurching onto an adjacent monitor.

From the first time I used the Developer Preview, the subtleties of the Edge UI and charms concerned me. It's not that it didn't work; it's just that it wasn't very obvious. There were no on-screen cues, nor did the operating system provide any explanation of the concepts.

After the release of the Consumer Preview we learned that there would be a tutorial to help out. When the final build of the software was completed, it included this tutorial, but we swiftly discovered that it was very rudimentary. It taught about swiping from the edges and putting the mouse cursors in the screen corners, but nothing more.

I've been using this interface off and on for a year now. I've given careful consideration to how the operating system works as a desktop user, and what it's like from a tablet perspective.

What Microsoft has attempted to pull off with Windows 8 is extremely ambitious. There are pieces that work well, and there are pieces that work less well. It has the feel of a transitional operating system, an attempt to bridge from one universe into the next, and yet it is when one attempts to use it transitionally—when using a mix of desktop applications and Metro applications—that it is at its worst. Stick to one universe—whether desktop or Metro—and it feels far more coherent.

Desktop delights

For a desktop user, the Start screen works as a mostly better Start menu. It presents more icons, it affords greater control over icon placement, it makes it easier to place the apps you care about front and center. It looks very different, yes, but it fills the same role as the Start menu and does so well.

It is not perfect. Windows 8 is not really sure about who the Start screen belongs to. Although the layout and position of the tiles belongs to the user, the operating system has a tendency to just spew icons for newly installed applications onto the Start screen. This was much more regulated on the Start menu; only the bottom slot could be used to promote a newly installed application.

I continue to hate the lack of unified search results in the Start screen. Splitting results between apps, settings, and files does not serve my purposes, especially as Windows makes the distinction between an app and a setting so arbitrary, with some configuration done in Control Panel (a "setting"), but other configuration done in MMC and the Administrative Tools (all "apps").

Enlarge/ This just isn't logical. This should be a setting, or at a pinch, a file. It's simply not an app.

When it comes to the core desktop experience itself, there are some welcome improvements. The overhauled copy progress dialogs are excellent. The graphs are pretty, and the ability to pause operations in progress is handy. Explorer has a ribbon UI, which I'm still pretty indifferent toward. It's different from Windows 7, but not appreciably better.

Bugbears remain. Those hot corners still need work on multimonitor systems. The traps aren't aggressive enough, making it still too hard to hit the right spot the first time, every time. I know I could use the extensive keyboard shortcuts, but I honestly don't want to: a GUI operating system needs to be effective when controlled with the mouse. If the traps, for example, reduced the mouse movement speed whenever it was in the vicinity (turning them into glue traps) I think it would go a long way toward fixing the problem.

I also still find the visual incongruity troublesome. Metro-esque portions impinge on the desktop, with things like the disk insertion notifications, default program specifications, and list of Wi-Fi networks all Metro-themed. It doesn't look right, and it doesn't feel right. Fortunately these things are relatively rare.

In a similar vein, some of the default settings are going to annoy desktop users. By default, Windows 8 uses the Metro Music, Video, and Photo apps for opening their respective file types. The desktop counterparts are still present (Windows Media Player and Photo Viewer), and for desktop users these make much better defaults. This only has to be changed once, so it's not a disaster. Just an annoyance.